Billet-Doux

Alex McNear

David Maraniss writes in next month’s Vanity Fair (see: Powerline Piece) about some of Obama's girlfriends.  One, Alex McNear, kept some of Obama's love letters (see: Daily Mail Article).  So, now we have some apparently true-to-life Obama quotes from which we can better measure the man ... independent of writings of questionable-authorship in his two books.  Back then Barack wrote to Alex:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

I, not being an expert in Eliot (or Münzer either), feel that Obama needs some expert pedagogical criticism of what, to me, sounds like sexual sophistry.  So see: New York Magazine Critique for more educated gradings of this billet-doux.

Then doesn't this also remind also you of Bill Clinton's oft-repeated pedantic dalliance-dances with his intended conquests using Whitman's Leaves of Grass?